Sullivan was one of the most influential American psychiatrists active in the early twentieth century. His contributions included establishing a standard method for psychiatric interviews and demonstrating the importance of milieu and psychosocial interventions in the care of first-break schizophrenic patients. He was also one of the founders of interpersonal psychoanalysis, emphasizing the importance of psychosocial forces in shaping personality development and in the pathogenesis of psychiatric illnesses. His uncanny aptitude in working with psychotic patients was linked to his lifelong struggle with homosexual impulses and addiction problems. His profound sense of “marginality” may have been rooted in his difficult childhood, growing up as the only child in an Irish catholic family isolated in a protestant rural New England town. The chapter also includes a brief discussion of the long struggle of mental health professionals toward “depathologizing” homosexuality.

A Welshman striving to make it in the English world, Jones’ path toward leadership in the international psychoanalytical movement was long and strenuous. Although not as innovative compared to others included in this volume, he made unique contributions in bringing psychoanalysis to the English-speaking world. On the brink of WWII, he risked his life to go to Vienna, already occupied by the Nazis, where he managed to convince the dying Freud to leave Austria for London. Personally responsible for bringing both Melanie Klein and Anna Freud to England, he was caught in the middle of vicious fights between these two powerful women and their followers, and barely survived a near-fatal heart attack. From age seventy to his death at seventy-nine, Jones labored at completing the 1500-page, three-volume Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, which remains the only officially authorized biography of Freud.